The Astral

Kate Christensen

Doubleday

Say this for Kate Christensen’s new novel The Astral: if nothing else, it’s a good antidote to Brooklyn nostalgia. No doubt there’s a certain allure to the borough’s hardscrabble, pre-hoodie days, but if living then would have meant hanging out with the likes of Harry Quirk and his friends, well, frankly, I’d just as soon not.

Harry is the book’s hero, or perhaps anti-hero, depending on your disposition toward aging bohemians with borderline drinking problems. A once modestly successful poet since fallen into obscurity, he is, as the story begins, living in a Greenpoint flophouse, having been tossed by his wife Luz from their apartment in the neighborhood’s Astral building after she found poems that he’d written addressed to other women, mistaking them for evidence of an affair. Given that the women in the poems are all fictional, this doesn’t seem entirely reasonable, but then Luz, as Harry frequently reminds us, isn’t really the reasonable sort.

Rather, she’s a hot-blooded Latina with a mean Catholic streak who can a hold a grudge like nobody’s business. In other words, like most all of the book’s characters, she’s something of a cliché. Along with Luz we get, for instance: drunken, violent Poles; shady, insular Hasids; a crusty salt-of-the-earth bartender; an indie sell-out turned foodie douchebag. The Astral is ostensibly the story of Harry getting his groove back—coming to terms with his wife, their marriage, himself and certain increasingly hard-to-maintain illusions—but Christensen actually seems most interested in capturing current hipster Brooklyn in all its absurd, kinetic glory. It’s a worthy task; it’s an interesting place. Unfortunately, what she comes up with is less a great New York novel than a cardboard menagerie of familiar borough types.

It doesn’t help that Harry is kind of a dope. The narrative, as it’s structured, flows through him, the story arriving filtered through his memories and prejudices and misconceptions. Occasionally (and particularly in one scene where he confronts Luz’s therapist), this makes for an interesting exploration of the ways in which couples misunderstand and deceive each other over the course of a relationship. Despite his training as a poet, though, Harry isn’t exactly a font of emotional insights, and more often than not we’re treated instead to drab, 
metaphor-laden monologues like this:

“When I really fucked up, after my peccadillo with Samantha, Luz knocked me off my pedestal and turned the klieg lights of her ice-cold gaze onto every bit of evidence, any minuscule contradiction or microscopic disparity she could uncover, building her case to prove that I was a lying, cheating worm…Luz had split me open with her fascistic scimitar, then she’d flayed me with the wet noodles of my own guilt.”

To be fair, it isn’t all this bad (although, on the other hand, much of it is). Christensen has a nice understanding of the pathologies of the male mind, and several episodes involving Harry’s son and a Long Island cult are an enjoyable break from the otherwise steady parade of stock Brooklyn characters. Nonetheless, 300 pages of Harry is plenty. That Luz lasted 30 years with the guy is a minor miracle.

There Is No Year

Blake Butler

Harper Perennial

Let’s not kid ourselves. I don’t understand half of what Blake Butler is getting at, and neither do you.

This is by design. Or, perhaps more to the point, necessity. Butler’s new novel, There Is No Year, is little more than an account of a suburban family’s daily goings-on, but told through a prism so disorienting and estranging as to make what would be the unremarkable details of their lives feel almost terrifyingly weird.

Butler is the founder and editor of the literary blog HTMLGiant, and the book reflects that site’s experimental bent. It’s characterized by incomprehension, the family wandering through their home like primitives caught in a world outside their understanding. Reading it is like stumbling across a dollhouse tableau built by a toymaker with a serious taste for psychedelics.

The story works by erasing boundaries, blurring the lines between characters and settings, stretching inches into miles, minutes into years. The family’s universe is impossibly elastic, their house ever expanding and contracting, they themselves entering and exiting bodies and copies of bodies, diffusing through the shells, crusts, carapaces that contain them, bleeding out into the world.

And then there is the world bleeding in. “For years the air above the earth had begun sagging, suffused by a nameless, ageless eye of light,” begins the novel. “Each day the light grew gently thicker, purer. Each day still felt the same. Its presence rode in ridges on the faces of the hours and in silent hair all down all arms.” Everywhere the family is confronted by this sort of flattening, anonymizing onslaught. Ants infest their house, eating holes in the floorboards, carving patterns in the painted walls. Words infect the son’s body, turning him blue and swollen. These are people being erased by information, their squawks and bleats subsumed in a ceaseless flood of language and symbols.

If this sounds to you like some grand metaphor for the internet age, well, you might be right. The book’s blurring of forms is so pervasive and wide-ranging, though, that it seems less an account of a world disordered by any particular agent and more a basic statement about the necessity and frailty of the tricks—naming, dividing, categorizing—our minds use to let us live.

There Is No Year isn’t a work that’s especially long on plot. A relationship of sorts develops between the son and a girl at his school. The father’s ever-expanding commute morphs into something of an epic quest. At root, though, the book is less a narrative to be puzzled out than an object to be taken in—a sort of Blue Rider painting masquerading as a novel.

Individual mileage with this will vary, of course. Aggressive opacity as a literary strategy has never been much of a crowd pleaser, and there are occasionally points at which you wonder if Butler has any more of an idea than his characters about what exactly is going on. Lurking amid the obscurity, though, is a strange, intense vision of the world. The great pleasures of the novel are the moments —and there are many—when this vision rises unsuspected from the page and grips you by the throat.

The Tiger’s Wife
by Téa Obreht

Random House

About a third of the way into The Tiger’s Wife, the first book from Téa Obreht, a Nazi bomb blows a hole in the wall of the Belgrade Zoo, freeing the tiger that gives the novel its name.

The tiger heads north, up the Danube, through fields and swamps filled with war dead and into the mountains above the town of Galina where it settles, preying on livestock and local game and the occasional unlucky hunter. One night, lured by the smell of food, it creeps down to the village into a butcher’s smokehouse where it comes upon the butcher’s wife in the back of the building waiting with a piece of meat in her hand. Finding his wife feeding the tiger, the butcher ties her up inside the smokehouse and leaves her there to be eaten. Several days later, however, he’s the one who’s gone missing, and two weeks after that his now-widow appears in town pregnant with what’s rumored to be the tiger’s child.

What exactly happened within this curious triangle is the mystery that drives the novel; the action, such as it is, revolves around the narrator Natalia’s efforts to make sense of the tale. The book is a story about stories—their uses and misuses; what they explain and what they obscure. Chock-full of fantastic narratives, it reads, by and large, like magical realism. There’s a recurring skepticism about the stories being told, though, that gives it an almost metafictional air. A doctor, Natalia boasts a strong rationalist streak, 
however difficult it may be to make sense of the last century or so of Balkan history.

An alum of the New Yorker‘s 20-under-40 fiction list, Obreht can certainly write, and the novel is filled with strange, lovely images. An elephant drags “its curled trunk like a fist along the ground.”The tiger spends his days in captivity “feeding on fat white columns of spine.”His slow trek northward out of the city toward Galina draws him through a blasted landscape of ruins and corpses, the surroundings wonderfully prefiguring and then paralleling his own growing savagery. An episode describing a visit by Natalia’s grandfather to the besieged city of Sarobor shows off a terrific sense of structure and pacing.

But there’s also a surprising amount of indiffrent prose mixed in—long, drab stretches that seem mainly designed just to move the book along. The novel’s present-day portions, in particular, feel half-heartedly done—more like scaffolding thrown up to bridge bits of plot than fully realized pieces of writing. It also suffers somewhat from its perhaps too many storylines. Instead of keying off one another to multiply the narrative’s momentum, they’re often on each other’s toes, making the novel seem simultaneously unfocused and overstuffed.

None of which is to say it’s not a fine book—especially for a first effort. It’s richly imagined and in many parts beautifully written. There’s just probably a slightly slimmer, slightly better version hiding within.

White Masks
By Elias Khoury
Archipelago

White Masks, the latest book from Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, kicks off in something of a noirish mode. Reading the newspaper one morning, the book’s narrator learns of the murder of a neighborhood man, Khalil Ahmad Jaber, whose mutilated body was found stripped to the waist and dumped in a Beirut street. The narrator (who remains nameless) finds himself unaccountably curious about this killing and embarks on his own investigation.

It’s an opening that seems to set things up for a detective story, but almost immediately, the narrator loses the thread. Roving through the war-ravaged city, he inspects medical reports, tracks down eyewitnesses, interviews doctors, housekeepers, soldiers, widows—anyone who might have crossed Jaber’s path. The book is a frame tale, the narrator’s search for clues the setting for the many narratives—invariably tragic—he comes across on his way.

But what to do with all of these narratives? This becomes the central dilemma of the novel—one that the narrator ultimately answers with what essentially amounts to a helpless shrug. “This is no tale,”he cautions at the book’s beginning, and he’s no sort of gumshoe. Each lead draws him deeper into wartime Beirut—a maze of absurd violence, unlucky turns, chance brutality—but none bring him any closer to solving the crime he set out investigating.

Of course, there isn’t a solution. How do you draw out of a civil war something so tidy as a murder mystery? Our narrator isn’t just the book’s detective, he’s its author as well, and too honest, it turns out, to piece together a convincing story. There are stories, lovely, quietly told stories of fallen sons, desperate widows, faithless husbands, crooked dentists, disillusioned militants… But they add up to nothing; they reveal only themselves. They ensnare and entangle and disorient, and then once they’re done, spin you around several times and send you back into the street more bewildered than you were before. Which is precisely the point.

Ergo and Soul of Wood
By Jakov Lind
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Open Letter, New York Review Books

Jakov Lind’s biography is the sort that demands to be led with. A Viennese Jew, Lind left Austria in the wake of the Anschluss, traveling to Holland to escape the Nazis. Five years later, when the occupying Germans began their first mass round-ups of Dutch Jews, Lind went underground, obtaining false papers in the name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek and taking a job as a barge worker ferrying goods up and down the Rhine. Shortly thereafter, with Allied bomb attacks making work on the river increasingly dangerous, Lind, in an irony that was certainly dark enough, if perhaps too straightforward, to sit comfortably at home in one of his stories, managed to get a job as a courier for the German Air Ministry. At the war’s end he assumed yet another identity—this time of a Haifa-born Jew named Jakov Chaklan. Traveling under this persona, he made his way from Marseille to Palestine, where he lived for a time on a kibbutz before returning to Europe, eventually settling in London in 1954.

Dropped atop the hypocenter of the 20th century, Lind managed miraculously to extricate himself from the disasters ordained for him. The characters who populate his fiction, two volumes of which—the story collection Soul of Wood and the novel Ergo—have recently been reissued in English translations by Ralph Manheim, are typically less successful.

Notably, they’re also less innocent. The title story from Soul of Wood concerns the efforts of a crippled WWI veteran named Wohlbrecht to smuggle a paralyzed Jewish boy to a mountain hideaway after his parents are sent to a concentration camp. After essentially leaving the boy in the woods to die, Wohlbrecht ends up at an insane asylum, where he spends his days helping a pair of doctors administer lethal injections. With the war winding down and Germany losing, the three of them realize they’ll likely be held accountable for their crimes, and so they race back to the woods where Wohlbrecht left the boy, planning to claim him as an exculpatory example of their good works. What begins seemingly as a tale of Schindleresque redemption ends with a cast wholly unaware they’d any need to be redeemed in the first place.

Soul of Wood‘s characters are in general remarkable for their indifference to the blood on their hands (or, in the cases of the less culpable, the blood running through the streets around them). In “The Pious Brother” a German princess whose six sons died fighting at the Russian front smugly lights candles at mass for their S.S. comrade who’s committed suicide. In “The Judgment” an unrepentant serial killer tries to lure his father to his prison cell in order to make him his final victim. In “Hurrah for Freedom” a husband and wife feast obliviously on their own children while a visiting medical student does his best to join them. The stories’ universe is one devoid not just of righteous characters, but of the idea of righteousness itself.

Ergo seems an almost sunny book by comparison. The tale of an absurd, decades-long epistolary battle between two men, Wacholder and Wurz, the novel follows Wacholder and his tenant Leo as they attempt, over the objections of Wacholder’s adopted son Aslan, to read Wurz out of existence. It’s a fanciful, profane, discursive work, what little plot it possesses tripping disjointedly along atop the characters’ ranting and obsessing. Soul of Wood, with its sinister dreamworlds and disoriented paranoiacs, inevitably draws comparisons to Kafka. Ergo, on the other hand, approaches more the nimble surrealism of a Flann O’Brien. Blackly comic and deeply pessimistic, the book is by no means a light read, but it manages somehow still to feel light on its feet. Ultimately, this is Lind’s great genius. He writes like a man juggling cannonballs, tossing the weightiest of fates about with a casualness that makes them seem more terrible still.